


can't carve a whistle

by irnan



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, author is ignorant of comics canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 07:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria Hill's never found it easy to explain why she became a SHIELD agent, but she knows why she stays one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	can't carve a whistle

**Author's Note:**

> HOW DID THIS EVEN. Erm, SPOILERS for the movie; absolutely no first-hand knowledge of 'proper' comic book canon!Maria Hill (or, indeed ANYONE ELSE in the avengers!verse) involved in this fic, for which I apologise profusely but have no regrets; written primarily because I like writing about awesome women and their backstories and motivations and stuff and also FEELINGS. Maria Hill/Steve Rogers, Maria Hill/awesomeness, Nat/awesomeness, passes the Bechdel Test and includes bonus!Tony.

The following things have always frightened Maria Hill: things she doesn't understand, things she can't fight, things that are intangible. She grew up strictly Catholic and it left its mark on her: the guilt she shrugs away, just words, just wind (I won't be made to feel guilty for myself) but a fear, fear of judgment, of this all-knowing thing that hovers at her shoulder with an anger like her mother's, a condemnation like her father's, well, that's more complicated.

(She doesn't remember when or how she stopped believing in a loving and benevolent almighty God; it snuck up on her, the way these things do sometimes, and now she tends to look away and feel sardonic when that comes up in conversation with her parents, her siblings, her extended family.)

*********

Twenty-two years old and a law student and the New York streets are filled with ash and dust and people screaming and crying. That's probably explanation enough.

*********

Fury recruits out of Quantico on a semi-regular basis; when he asks her how she stayed so cool during that training exercise, so composed while the shots fell - when he looks at her, towers over her, and the scars around his eyepatch get inappropriately fascinating because it's easier than looking back - Maria, who was Mareeeeeeeeeee all her childhood and Mar for most of college and Virgin Mary and Saint Magdalene and Mary Mary Quite Contrary and Bloody Mary and Mary Queen of Scots and half a dozen other stupid nicknames none of which fit, shrugged a bit and said, eldest of ten, you learn to.

Looking back on it, that was what did it; she fixed her fate by being ice-cold unbreakable after the explosion as well as during.

*********

Anyway, her tenses are running together and so are her memories. She's not slept in fifty-five hours and her head aches. There's still dried blood on her face and dust and dirt on her hands, oil, the smell of burnt plastic and gunpowder.

Eventually they make her sit down on a bed in the hospital wing, and they disinfect and scrub and smear cream and then they go away.

Maria breathes, slowly, in and out, and remembers that she has a job to do, and that it's not over yet, and that (Phil is dead) (the world was almost destroyed today) (the helicarrier was almost destroyed today) (Fury is playing games she doesn't and doesn't want to understand) (there's no going back from what they've done here, what they've unleashed: Avengers, Christ on a fucking cracker, Jesus wept) she is Agent Maria fucking Hill.

Then she stands up, and she goes to do her job.

*********

Fury believes in things. This is where he and Maria stop meeting in the middle and fall apart in opposite directions. He is her boss and her mentor and is, on the whole, responsible for her career and her life in general turning out the way it has. She has no complaints on that score.

But he frightens her.

The Avengers frighten her. Not, it must be said, as individuals, but most certainly as a group. Fury teeters on the edge of insubordination, of going rogue, of cutting all his tenuous ties to anything remotely resembling legitimacy, democracy, rule of law, and he does it for them, for this notion he has that they are greater than the sum of their parts, that they can come together and remake themselves into Saviours: which is idealism in its purest form, whole and unbroken and on some level intensely admirable –

But on another level, it’s intensely _dumb_ , and sort of naïve.

*********

"I don't like Saviours - I don't trust them," she tries explaining.

Cap looks astonished and amused and thoughtful all at once. "Why not? Why would anyone not?"

Maria waves her hands. The bridge elevator's stuck again, Stark and Banner set something off and jammed half the non-essential electronics systems on the carrier, thank God they're already in the water and won't be crashing out of the sky. She and Cap are sitting opposite each other on the floor in dull, dim red emergency lighting. He's wearing civvies; she isn't. She's armed; he isn't. There's a trap door above them in the elevator roof they could get out of if they had to.

"Because," she says, "once you need a Saviour - that's giving up your autonomy, that's - giving up responsibility. People should make their own choices, and people should defend themselves."

Cap drums his fingers on his knee, drawn up in an easy, casual stance he hadn't had seven months ago. "I see – as if that's liberty - that people should get to choose to destroy themselves if they want. I mean, I think that's awful, it's so - so uncaring."

"It's not," says Maria, "it's respect - respect for their choices, for their ability to make choices. You don't get to decide what's best for others."

"Well, of course not," says Cap. "But neither do other people - people like Loki - bullies, you know."

"The point is that we ought to be able to find a way to deal with bullies that doesn't rely on you or Stark or Thor or anyone else, anyone bigger or stronger than we are ourselves," says Maria, and Cap's blue eyes flash with understanding - she thinks there's pain there too, old pain, scabbed over but still aching.

"Yeah," he says. "That. I used to think that."

Maria's eyebrows climb. "What happened?"

He grins. "I got beat up a lot."

In spite of herself she laughs - she's read his file and seen the yellowing old pictures, the medical reports; intellectually she has a fairly good idea of how easy it would have been, once, to beat Steve Rogers up. But her intellect is fighting a losing battle against the sight in front of her: the long legs and broad shoulders and the strong calloused hands. Cap's still grinning, he knows what she's thinking, but the pain is still there as well.

"Yeah. So I thought that, and I got beat up a lot, and - well, I never told him, but I was always pretty grateful for being saved."

Him? Barnes. That was in his file too.

Maria nods. "Well, I got to save myself. It was... it wasn't pretty. But I think I'm a better person for it."

She doesn't know why she admits that to him, unless it's that showing her even that small glimpse of his grief made him vulnerable in a way she wasn't expecting to see, and Maria always pays her debts in the same currency she occurred them in.

"I know I'm a better person for having known Bucky," says Steve. "I guess we're both extrapolating from our own experiences and projecting them onto everyone else."

He says it with straight-faced ruefulness. Maria laughs out loud.

*********

There are days when Maria wants to ram Tony Stark with an 18-wheeler, but this one time she says "Stark, shut up," at the same time as Cap says, "Tony, be quiet," and after that Tony is sort of a lot funnier.

*********

She killed a man for the first time when she was twenty-five, but Maria is not Nat: she keeps no ledgers, no records, she does not tally a plus and a minus for each life saved or ended. Some things cannot be counted and only you yourself know if they were justified or not, if you can live with them or not.

Maria can live with a hell of a lot, but she won't live with this, and Anderson goes down in a broken-nosed heap, clutching at his groin where she's just kneed his balls into his stomach cavity; Maria grabs his gun and his security badge and comes around what she's already started to think of as the torture table.

Nat smiles at her, at once grateful and dry. "I'd've been out," she says. You've wrecked the mission, Agent Hill. You're nice, but you've still wrecked it.

"Shut up," says Maria. "You know as well as I do how not compromised you are. No cover is worth this."

"Flushing out our leak might be," says Nat sharply.

"Putting yourself out there is one thing. Getting tortured by the CIA is another. Come on, let's get outta here."

Of course, when Anderson's boss turns out to be their leak everything gets a bit more complicated. There's shooting and running and Nat does that thing with her thighs that Maria tried once to learn and then gave up as a lost cause; they set a virus in his computers on the way out as a leaving gift; Nat shoots a goon who stabs her below the knee and Maria strangles a guy from behind with a laptop power cable. It's not pretty. Neither's the slug through the sewage after, the scramble along the tunnel out of the facility, the concrete scrapes their skin when they stumble against the walls a kind of three-legged SHIELD monster and then there's the thirty foot cliff without any handholds so they jump and pray the water's deep enough.

It's deep enough. Out of the base, the tracker Bruce injected into Natasha's ankle will start signalling again; shivering and hurt and bleeding they cling to barnacled rocks and hide their faces, Nat's red hair, from the searchers on the cliffs high above.

"So what do you think," says Nat, "does this count as bonding?"

Maria laughs - sort of hoarse and sort of choked - she's afraid her ribs are busted but it's not as if there's anything either of them can do about that, any more than they could fix Natasha's knife wound. "Sure. You, me, a secret base full of bad guys..."

"Next time we'll just go see a movie," says Natasha solemnly.

"Come round my place," says Maria, "we'll eat pizza and watch Bringing Up Baby."

"I love Hepburn," says Nat happily.

Maybe twenty minutes later there's a jet overhead.

"Aww, they came in person," says Natasha.

"Hmm?"

"My boys."

She says it so matter-of-factly that Maria's tempted to have hysterics. She doesn't. Stark - Iron Man - whichever - lifts them out of the water, one after the other. Barton and Nat fist-bump, and then he offers one to Maria as well, and she's exhausted and soaking and in acres of pain, so there's nothing to do but bump back.

*********

Maria briefs Cap from her hospital bed. Her hands gesture of their own accord when she describes the cable - loop, pull, snap tight. Steve's hands mirror hers with the ease of long practice and he says "Mokroye delo they used to call it... laptop cable's strong enough for that?"

"Who knew?" says Maria. She won't look away and neither does he: she hates that they're having this conversation, that they're being so easy about it, so natural, that they're comparing notes on murder weapons, and she can read it in his face that Steve does too, but they are who they are and wet work is a thing they can both live with, just as Nat and the Hawk and Fury can. The professional killers. The professional survivors.

*********

She and Nat have Hepburn Night. It's awesome. The next Saturday, they go clubbing. Maria... doesn't really remember much of what happened after Nat - and then the - and at one point she thinks she was standing on a table with a pool cue - but maybe that was her imagination.

Or not.

*********

When Maria finds out about Phil and the coma she drops her weapon and hands in her ID and refuses to arrest Tasha for clocking Fury and fucking well _quits_ , because there are some things she can live with and some things she can't. Letting Fury use Phil's supposed death the way he had had been just this side of what Maria could live with. This is a whole other kettle of fish (because Tasha loves Phil) (because Clint loves Phil) (because Phil means something at least to every single one of the Avengers) (because Phil taught her passcodes and tech and what-lunches-to-avoid-in-the-mess-hall) because Fury _has no right_ to choose his own greater good.

"You're all idiots, go back to work," says Phil. "It's a price we pay. It was my idea."

No one bothers to listen to him; he's in a frigging hospital gown. Maria paces the Tower balcony and drinks and paces and drinks some more.

"We won't change it," says Nat thoughtfully. "By going back, I mean, we won't change it."

"No, I know," says Maria. "And we won't change him - he's manipulative and he uses people - he puts ideas ahead of individuals. Ste--"

She almost bites her tongue on that.

Nat looks up. "Steve doesn't do that?"

"Shut up, Romanoff."

"OK," says Nat easily. "Though of course you're right. He doesn't. Nor do any of them. I -"

"You don't either," says Maria, perfect truth. Guilt is what you get as a result of realising that individuals _ought_ to come first.

"OK," says Nat again. "Look. If we go back."

"Like damage control?"

She shrugs and downs the last of her vodka.

"I don't know, Nat."

"Neither do I," says Nat. "I know I won't do it alone, though."

"Phil won't quit."

Nat shakes her head. "Phil... Phil was my handler for years. He and Clint... you know what they pulled me away from. You know what they did for me. But he sees things the way Fury does, Mari."

Maria crosses her arms over her chest, shivers a bit in a perfectly warm and inoffensive breeze as it meanders past the Tower, wishes she hadn't left her drink inside.

"You and me against the world?"

"I think," says Nat, "someone has to do it."

*********

“What did you mean when you said he lacked conviction?”

Phil shrugs, and must still be sore because it makes him wince, a miniscule twitch of his lips. The elevator hums and he puts a hand up to his side, checking the gun in his holster, smoothing his jacket.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” he says. “Just believe.”

*********

Maria stopped _believing_ in the Big Picture around the same time she stopped _believing_ in benevolent Gods - some nebulous moment between saying bedtime prayers when she was six and waking up at seventeen in the middle of a class to find herself mouthing off about Catholic misogyny.

Her mother slapped her for that when the news reached her. _You believe what you want but while you're under my roof you'll respect the way you were raised and the beliefs you were raised with_.

There's no Big Picture. There's not even really any greater good – everyone who ever talks about the greater good does so in terms of future events that have yet to come to pass, future disasters averted before they’ve begun, future good they’ll never see.

Maria doesn’t believe in defining the present by the future. There’s only ever here and now, and what we do with it. Your actions, not their results, define your morality.

Whenever she looks at laptop cables she wonders: what does that make my morality?

*********

She knows of course that Fury doesn't believe the end justifies the means, that there are lines he doesn't cross, good lines, true ones. But Jesus wept: the ones he does cross are _personal_.

*********

None of this makes her any fonder of the Avengers Initiative as an initiative. She and Steve still argue about it in the mess hall; sometimes Tony joins in.

"Of course it's crap," he says. "I can think of more objections than you ever knew existed just off the top of my head. I mean, does Fury even report to anyone? Any kind of government at all?"

"Sure he does," says Maria, but, well, she's not all that certain where the Councilmen come from herself. "Why are you on my side of the argument but still on the team?"

Tony pauses; Steve glances over at him, eyebrows raised - curious and calm, like he knows the answer but is wondering if Tony will say it out loud (to an outsider). The genius billionaire playboy philanthropist opens his hands in a gesture that's surrender and strength both at once.

"Like Nat says," he says steadily. "I got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out."

For the first time in nearly two years Maria thinks she understands why Nat and Tony put up with each other.

*********

(Maria kind of likes arguing with Steve in the mess hall.)

*********

"What would you do," he asks her once, "if Fury died tomorrow and they made you Director?"

"Arrest you," she says promptly.

He laughs; neither of them are sure if she means it or not.

"I don't know," Maria says. "I really don't." She curls her fingers over, presses her thumbs against the side of her forefingers, closed off but not a fist. "I could take the Initiative apart. But that wouldn't stop you."

"No," agrees Steve.

"And if I did - how would that make me better than what we've got? Imposing the way I think the world should run onto other people."

"On the other hand I don't see you ever keeping Phil in a coma underground for nearly a year."

"Leave me out of this, please," says Coulson plaintively beside them. "It's three-thirty in the morning and every word out of your mouths is hurting my brain."

"They're hurting everybody's brains, Phil," says Clint, and the rest of the Avengers groan agreement.

*********

Her parents come to town for Christmas, bringing Tommy and Catherine. Maria hid all her rock music and drank all the booze before they arrived, which makes her feel like a guilty teenager, and also slightly ridiculous, but whatever. She loves her parents but holy Mary mother of God she resents their disapproval.

And that's only one of the myriad of reasons behind her decision to tell them she was a paralegal, not Head of Security for SHIELD itself and sometime superhero babysitter.

Things are going well until they get to Fifth Avenue to do the tourist thing for Tommy and Cath and run right into Tony Stark.

"Hill, ye Gods, nice outfit, I didn't recognise you, when are you ever not in uniform and what's with the rugrats?"

"For God's sake they're teenagers," says Maria. "Where's your supervisor, don't tell me Steve lets you run around town without a leash on."

"You're Tony Stark!" says Tommy.

"I am," says Tony, smirking. "I really genuinely am. You're?"

"Tommy Hill," he says, looking awed.

Tony's eyebrows climb.

Maria sighs. "Littlest brother," she says. "Littlest sister, Cath. And Mom and Dad."

Why does he not have Pepper with him, this would be so much easier if he just had Pepper with him.

"Mr and Mrs Hill, your daughter is frighteningly competent and I congratulate you," says Tony, shaking hands solemnly.

"You never said you worked for Stark Industries," says Cath accusingly. "Why didn't you say?"

_ Because I don't _ .

Tony looks at her. She meets his gaze steadily.

"Classified information," says Tony to Cath. "Top secret. That sorta thing."

"Woooooooooooow."

"Hey Mari, have you met _Captain America_ too?"

Something maybe sort of perhaps kind of jolts in her chest. (Has she _met_ Captain America? Steve in uniform with the cowl off, hair a mess, filthy, tired, bruised and triumphant; Steve's quick hands gesturing as they argue; Steve standing by a workbench in Tony's lab, running a hand over the notches in his shield.) Fuck, unplanned variable. Well, it's been coming on for a while. 

Not as sneaky as she'd like to pretend to herself.

"OK, we have _got_ to go," says Maria firmly.

"Oh, Maria, there's no need to be rude -"

"Certainly not, Mrs Hill ma'am, maybe you'd like to have lunch with me -"

"Tony I will rip your lungs out and feed them to the ducks in Central Park and then I will march straight to Pepper and Steve and -"

Tony sighs. "Tattle-tale. Well, fair enough. Chin up kid I'll send you the latest phone for Christmas... ma'am. Sir. Mini-Maria."

Back to Maria. They look at each other. She grins a bit, and it shows her teeth. "So, Merry Christmas. See you next week."

"Merry Christmas," says Tony solemnly. "Tower at New Year's?"

Maria opens her mouth to say no, but the other thing comes out of it.

For the first time in decades, she literally hates her life.

*********

There are three things Maria Hill learns at Tony Stark's New Year's party: one, how to make the perfect Bloody Mary, courtesy of Bruce. Two, that she'll never be able to tie a cherry stem with her tongue, no matter how many times Clint demonstrates. Three, that Steve Rogers kisses exactly the way Captain America _ought_ to kiss: gently and interestedly and warmly, promising, inviting.

"So I thought I could get you to come to dinner with me," he says while everyone's cheering the New Year around them. He has his hands on her hips. Maria likes his hands, and she likes them on her hips, and maybe (hopefully) other places as well.

But: she tilts her head up and "I'd rather go see a baseball game," falls out of her mouth, because she's drunk and stupid and kind of Not Good At Talking To People She _Like_ -Likes (and this is the second time in a week her mouth's run off without her, what the hell?).

But Steve grins. "Cool," he says happily. "I'll get tickets."

 


End file.
